James Fallows is the Washington editor of The Atlantic and a
contributing editor of The Washington Monthly. This piece is an
expansion of a commentary the author did for National Public Radio.

During the six weeks of combat in the Persian Gulf, one of the
local TV news stations in Washington ran a promotional clip with a
wartime theme. It showed its broadcasters in pensive poses, had a flag
flapping in the background, and then ran its slogan: "We'll
get through this together."

It was done nicely enough, and was the sort of thing that must have
been common during World War II. The tone it evoked was of loyal
citizens bundling bandages on the home front while waiting for the
troops to return. Watching it, I realized that I had never seen such an
announcement, with its emphasis on everyone helping each other through a
shared and difficult experience, during the Vietnam war.

The only problem with the ad was that it was a lie. Half a million
soldiers were getting through something difficult and dangerous in the
desert. Their families were disrupted, worried, and sometimes grieved.
But the country as a whole was not "getting through" anything
in particular. Indeed, the ability to feel, in a self-dramatizing
"get through this together" way, like a country at war,
without exposing anyone except the soldiers and their families to the
inconveniences or rigors of real war, points to one of the strangest
twists of our recent polities.

While the fighting was under way, there was no shortage of stoic
imagery suggesting, as did the TV ad, that everyone was pulling together
to get the job done. A Washington Post travel writer, without the
slightest hint of irony, said in a column that he would do his part by
"hop-scotching down the South American continent" on a
U.S.-owned airline. "To stay home, in my opinion, is to bow to
Saddam Hussein's threats," he explained. "I don't
plan to yield to the Iraqi leader's intimidation, but of course
that is a personal decision." Not everyone could be expected to be
quite so brave. But many were! A spokesman for the Vail ski resort in
Colorado said that, despite the dangers of travel, "People are
still coming, and they are coming strong. We feel very, very
fortunate."

My point about wartime sacrifice is not the familiar "class
war" theme about who is in the army and who is on the slopes.
Rather it concerns the bizarre struck-by-lightning nature of
"getting through" this war: if you or your loved ones were not
in Saudi Arabia, you were not involved at all. Duty free

The 500,000 soldiers in the Gulf made up one-fifth of one percent
of the American public. If we assume, generously, that each of them had
100 immediate relatives or friends, and further assume, unrealistically,
that none of those groups of 100 overlapped (as they actually did, since
military families, like teachers' or steelworkers' families,
tend to know each other), it would still mean that only 20 percent of
the people in the country were touched by the war in even a secondhand
way. The other 80 percent were "getting through" an experience
that did not affect them except as something to watch on TV. When the
war was over, many Americans felt, "We won." The U.S. military
certainly won; most of the rest of us won only in the way that New York Giant fans "won" the last Super Bowl.

It is inevitable that a minority will bear the direct cost of any
war. The difference is that in this case the government did not ask
anything of people who did not happen to be in uniform or in the
reserves when the war began. James Baker and Nicholas Brady went to the
Germans and Japanese, asking them to put up more money; George Bush
never made the same request of us. American soldiers fought among
burning oil fields, in part to keep Saddam Hussein from exerting a
stranglehold over the world's oil supply. Neither Bush nor anyone
else in his administration seriously urged that we conserve gasoline,
pay more for the gas we use, or alter our "way of life" to any
degree so as to make ourselves less vulnerable to the next dictator in
the Middle East.

Gasoline prices began falling almost as soon as the air war began,
and by the time the war was over they were lower than they'd been
before Iraq invaded Kuwait. There will never be a more propitious moment
to apply higher gasoline taxes: The price was going down anyway, and
American soldiers were risking their lives while we drove on. It would
have been the simplest act of leadership for Bush to say: We've
learned in the past few months that 1.60 gas won't kill us.
Let's voluntarily keep the price there, for our own purposes,
rather than letting some future Saddam Hussein drive it up when
it's convenient for him--and we'll use the money to pay our
soldiers give ourselves an incentive to conserve, and help American
industry develop more efficient technology. We're asking our men
and women in uniform to risk their lives. The rest of us can risk a
couple of dollars per week. Instead, as retail prices fell back toward $
1.10, the press and administration heralded this as proof that America
had really won the war. When Bush finally committed troops to ground
combat, he asked, soberly, that Americans give a prayer for all the
soldiers in harm's way. It was moving-and remarkable, for it was
the only thing he ever asked us to do.

The explanation for this approach could be that Bush had come to
see himself as a commander, whose goal first and last was to win a war,
rather than as a national leader in the broadest sense. From the
commander's perspective, any step that reduces domestic sacrifice
or confines hardship to a specific group is useful, since it keeps
complaints to a minimum and lets him get on with his work. The great
wartime leaders-Churchill, FDR-emerged during struggles in which their
nation's future really was on the line, and they looked for ways to
link, rather than separate, the sacrifices the army and the public were
making. The soldiers did the fighting, but the civilians collected tin
cans and newspapers, ran local civil defense and draft boards, and
endured a wide variety of price controls and rationing of everything
from groceries to gasoline. During both world wars, the Korean war, and
even, belatedly, Vietnam, federal taxes went up explicitly to offset the
war's cost. By contrast, in America's "splendid little
wars," against first Mexico and then Spain, presidents Polk and
McKinley behaved more like commanders, letting the army do its job
without imposing on anyone else.

Bush may simply have decided that the PolkMcKinley model was right
for the Gulf war. But something else was involved: a shift in political
culture that George Bush both reflected and pandered to.

The critic Philip Rahv wrote his famous essay, "Paleface and
Redskin," to argue that literary culture in America was divided
into two great camps. On one side were the Palefaces, led by Henry
James, who wanted things orderly and refined. On the other side were the
Redskins, from Walt Whitman to Norman Mailer or, now, Tom Wolfe, who
wanted to change the rules and reinvent tradition. The tension between
the two, Rahv said, gave American literature its distinctive shape.

There is a comparable deep tension in American political culture,
which could be called Miller Time versus Grindstone Time. Miller Time
implies the idea of taking it easy, striking it rich, figuring out an
angle that will let you sit back while others do the work. This is the
only country whose founding document talks about the "pursuit of
happiness," and where a major politician, Huey Long, could run for
office on the slogan "Every Man a King." The electric golf
cart, the "golden parachute" employment deal, the casual
sayings like "Take it easy" and "Don't work too
hard," the Miller Time ads themselves-these all reflect a
sensibility that is not so obvious in, say, Germany or Japan. Gerald
Ford lived out this part of the American dream when he went straight
from the White House to Vail and Palm Springs. The Miller Time ideal is
also built into our economic theory, which says that the
individual's unending pursuit of "welfare"-more money,
more leisure, more of the fruits of work with less of the pain-is the
force that makes societies go.

Presidential retreat

But everyone knows that this is not the whole story, of individual
motivation or of American life. The American political and economic
system, which is supposed to release individuals from needless
limitations, cannot work properly unless individuals put limits on
themselves or agree collectively to limits. Otherwise we kill off all
the passenger pigeons, no one pays his taxes, everyone bribes the
police. Most parents are willing to save or sacrifice for their
children's education, in part because it's economically
rational but also because fulfilling this duty makes them feel satisfied
and proud. The whole idea of duty is the antithesis of Miller Time, but
duty has done at least as much as leisure to form America's view of
itself. The Pilgrims shivering in the wilderness, the immigrants
stitching in their tenements, Thomas Edison trying thousands of
materials before finding the one that would work as a filament in a
light bulb-these, even more than Gerald Ford, shape the idea of American
values. Most people view hard work not as an evil but as something they
take satisfaction from having completed or endured. Even the Miller Time
ads play to the idea that leisure is more enjoyable if it has been
earned: "You've just finished repairing a crack in a nuclear
power station. Novi, it's Miller Time."

The satisfactions of working hard, as well as playing hard, are
still part of American behavior. We see this in athletes preparing for
championships, political workers during a campaign, even the exercise
boom that has persuaded many people that they must punish themselves to
be fit. Mormon parents still send their children on twer-year missions
overseas; teenaged boys still practice lay-ups for hours, thinking that
if they work hard enough, the NBA awaits; volunteers still sign up for
the Marines precisely because they've heard it's tough. But
over the past decade, the idea of waiting, enduring, taking pride from
time at the grindstone has almost completely vanished from our public,
political life.

This change coincided with the rise of Ronald Reagan, which is a
cultural rather than a partisan comment. The sunniness of Reagan's
character and his relaxed working habits personified the content of many
of his policies, which was that we would do better if we were not so
hard on ourselves. By contrast, Jimmy Carter in 1980, Walter Mondale in
1984, and Michael Dukakis in 1988 seemed to express a hopeless,
eat-your-spinach view of the future. When they were humiliated, they
took the very ideas of "sacrifice" and
"responsibility" out of political respectability too.

The result has been a structure of politics based on something
everyone knows is impossible in his personal life: the promise of
permanent Miller Time. Taxes won't go up, middle-class benefits
won't go down, but America will still enjoy its mighty place in the
world. Any subject that would involve middleclass sacrifice, from a
means test for entitlements to a national service plan, is politically
taboo. In his State of the Union address, delivered while thousands of
Americans were in combat and nearly a dozen were held as POWs in
Baghdad, Bush said that America must keep doing the "hard work of
freedom." At that point, Bush could have asked for almost anything.
If he had merely suggested, as a sign of commitment more tangible than
yellow ribbons, that Americans buy low-interest war bonds to support our
troops, millions of Americans would have responded. Your brothers and
sisters are risking their lives, he could have said; surely you can lend
your government some money for three points below prime. (Bush could
have asked families who could afford it to buy $1,000 or even $5,000
bonds, and everyone else to do what he or she could. At $100 per
American, the bonds would bring in $25 billion.) But Bush did not ask
for anything. Not bonds, not taxes, not that we organize to take care of
children whom two-soldier families had left behind, not that we donate
to the refugee groups that were sure to face new demands in the Middle
East, not that we do anything but watch and feel proud. Every specific
proposal in his speech was either a new government benefit or a new tax
break.

If the concepts of paying our way, doing our part, and earning our
rewards had completely disappeared from American culture, we could
forget about restoring them to our public life. But, as the volunteer
soldiers themselves demonstrate, these ingredients are still part of the
American makeup. They await a leader who can figure out how to bring
them back into the public realm.

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